


Everything After

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: F/M, Pretentious
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-05-03
Updated: 2005-05-03
Packaged: 2017-10-24 20:28:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/267556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p><i>"There we were - demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance - and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. Don´t you see?! We´re actors - we´re the opposite of people!"</i></p><p>Rosencrantz and Guildersten are dead, Tom Stoppard</p>
    </blockquote>





	Everything After

**Author's Note:**

> _"There we were - demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance - and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. Don´t you see?! We´re actors - we´re the opposite of people!"_
> 
> Rosencrantz and Guildersten are dead, Tom Stoppard

**solipsism**

*

[Hamlet in the fifth act]

- _the gypsy said: somebody will break your heart under the flags, between the sands, between abandoned young private´s diaries_ -

A lone figure on a dune; the shape of a man against a vast landscape. The history of art has gone through ages when this kind of melancholic image was ferviently captured. Roy Mustang offers quite a fashionable portrait, standing like that, specially among the romantics, sad, solitaire, rebellious.

Would William Turner come and paint him? How well would he manage the painting of sand? He had a keen eye for ships trapped in tempentuous storms, and curling breaking waves, but Roy has never seen the ocean.

He looks ahead and the endless desert makes him think about eternity.

He looks down and his own hands only contain destruction and death.

Eternity and death; a conjuction that terrifies him.

So you want to live through the ashes of the beautiful corpses left behind. Strangers with no name or names that mean nothing to him; red eyes, vacant eyes, closed eyes. Roy makes up little biographies for the people he kills, he stabs himself deeper.

It has taken Hawkeye a bit to find him. The dunes look all the same, even if they are not.

"You are going to get sunburnt out here."

If that could be possible, he thinks, a tone of self-pity painting his thoughts, the voice inside languid and breaking. If I could burn and dissapear ( _ashes ashes ashes_ ) like those I've killed, dissapear and forever be in the wind, beyond good and evil, like I've always wanted, longed for. If only that could happen.

"Come on," Hawkeye offers, grabbing his arm.

But Roy disentangles himself from her grip, remains, heels buried on the ground, in his spot. Looking ahead them, looking nowhere in particular, not looking at her. All his features, his pursed lips, his whole figure cut against the fading daylight blue and grey (the funeral of colour and light and life), seem to tell her _you know nothing_ , or something along those lines and Hawkeye knows at least this: it´s true, she knows nothing. Of his pain, of his solitude, of the burden of his own knowledge. What she doesn't know is if she has the courage enough to find out but that's only a half-truth, because she is willing to try.

 _  
_

Your ignorance is your blessing, his eyes seem to say, but they are not looking at her.

(once she asked him what happened when she was not with him; Roy looked at her in horror, that time, and she understood that he couldn't bring himself to make her share the burden, that he just couldn't, _no_ , _I won't stain you with words_ )

It takes him some seconds (counted, punctuated by their breathing and the strange red wind around them) but he turns and looks at him again.

/// 

"Do you love me?"

There is an instant of plain, meaningless silence, in which Hawkeye looks at him like Roy was some sort of fantastical insect that shouldn´t be found in this part of the world, something strange and blinding like the midnight sun.

"You ask as if you didn't know the answer."

Roy nods, agreeing.

-little lost child lifted his head, like standing under never-ending rain even under a hot sun, arms around his legs, shivering-

"Are you real?"

"What?"

"Could it be that...I invented you? Just like I make up fictional pasts, lives and loves for the people I kill. Have I invented you?"

Sometimes she seems just too perfect; not perfect, just too fitting. But not like two halves of one person fit together or like soulmates and that sort of fairytale crap Roy despises (because it cheapens the real thing, this is: that I am here, that you are here, and we are not looking for excuses) but rather like the world has lifted its dark veil and he can finally grap a shred of truth, even if it's only this tiny bit, this feeling, this moment, now, present tense.

And so Hawkeye smiles (in present tense, under Roy´s glance, his amazement) in that secret fashion of her; a smile so seldom presented that of course he has imagined it was all in his mind, that he has made up exactly the kind of smile he´d like to see.

"If you have, I'm glad about it."

Silence.

(but the wind and the breathing again and the moving of the earth underneath, sizzling)

Silence is the pause full of breath and wind and this is story is written in the pauses, like poetry, in the margins, hidden in plain sight, only to be discovered by lovers and dreamers. Without a word Roy puts his hand on her shoulder, burying his fingers in her coat until there are bruises, and he drawns her to him.

He has meant to be gentle. Instead: he kisses her with such possessiveness that even he is surprised about. He doesn´t want to scare her, he has pictured kissing her many times before, he just didn´t know he would need it so much, when the time came.

(they kiss for the first time, but their love is ancient, ageless like conrinthian columns, stone turned into leyend by the lapping of centuries, stories and devotion over its hard rock)

With the swiftness and slow-motion like feeling of catching butterflies, Roy stretches his arms, his hand reaching for her hair, his fingers never really getting there, just to her shadow.

"Your hair is full of sand."

He presses herself to him even stronger, until it hurts them both.

Roy whispers into her ear, mouth full of hair, hair full of sand, voice full of sand, very softly.

"I´m not here to break your heart; only your chains."

-and maybe the gypsy was wrong-

She cannot see his face, buried in her neck, but she knows his wetness, the refusal to let go, the need and the doubt, she knows how cold his nights are and how much colder they would get without her, the way he twists his fingers around her coat, and how he sees himself, this moment: just a madman begging you not to go, not to left him, not alone, not with this mess between his hands, not just with barely a memory of this chance, this short-haired girl he used to love once and who left him.

Come, stay a little while with me, and write the poetry of un-words, because loving is like drawing on the sand.

She puts her hands over his, and presses tighter.

*

"What happened in Ishval?"

He doesn´t really wants to lie to Edward Elric, he has never meant to lie to him; so he changes the subject instead.

*

 **  
**

**perfidy**

*

[1938. Paris. Samuel Beckett is stabbed by a man whom, interrogated later about why he did, could only say: "Je ne sais pas monsieur".]

(Love is random, randomly chosen and given, the philosopher says, only an accident _and you could have met any other girl and not me_ , and how would that have affected the scale of the maps, the turning of the earth, pages and pages of history...?

I have wanted you to know _how you´ve changed me_ , the subtle way I have taken shape. In your hands)

"I wanted a life without passion. I´m betraying everything I believe right now."

Roy shakes his head.

"You only told yourself you wanted a life without passion, but truth is..." he gets distracted a second by her thumb drawing lines, circles, crosses over his chest. "Truth is you are every bit of a romantic as the rest of us."

A young smile comes and goes upon his lips, Hawkeye has no choice but to bend and try to capture it; she finds only his mouth instead, curved, hot and demanding. His fingers play with the short hair at the back of her neck.

He needs her so much closer, but for now this would do.

"So," he continues, still mouthful of her flavour, "do me a favor: next time somebody asks about it you should admit you are a hopeless romantic."

And Hawkeye laughs softly, but maybe it´s just because Roy´s fingertips tickle her, pressing lightly between vertebrae, or because of the vibrant irony (I would tell you about it, but you wouldn´t believe me), that it´s him who has made her a hopeless romantic.

This is before.

Before the story begins.

Before the Elric brothers.

Before everything falls apart and the sky breaks.

This goes unrecorded, this can´t be forgotten because it can´t be remembered in the first place. This is one of this times that never make it into the panels.

(but if you look really really carefully and close, you can feel the ghost of this story wandering through those panels, in water-clear ink)

Years later it´s Roy himself who asks her if she is a romantic. His wide smile tells Hawkeye he is remembering.

He remembers everything.

She could lie; she never promised anything. But it would feel like a kind of betrayal. Some minor, cheap betrayal. She is unable to do that to him.

Hawkeye nods and in a very sweet voice she agrees.

He laughs.

(the confession was worthy, after all; she hasn´t seen him laugh like this in some time)

*

 **  
**

**Bell jar**

*

[Ted Hughes´ first book was titled "The Hawk in the Rain"]

"Earlier, when Edward Elric asked you about...about Ishval..."

Roy pretends to resume going through the papers, through Fury's annotations, he pretends but _we know each other too well for that_.

But okay, she´ll pretend she does not notice the subtle lies you build your life against.

"I want to erase the word Ishval from any book, tore it from the maps, extricate it from the dictionary, burn away any page it's written on. I want to forbid people from using that name...so I will never see that look on your face again."

Hawkeye stretches her hands and graps something invisible, as if she could really destroy that Ishvar in her mind, clutching it with a hard fist.

Roy looks at her and it's that face again, and she is the one who has mentioned Ishval this time, she is the one who has pulled the old Roy to the surface again, the one who hated himself so much that it used to drive him to throw up every night, before going to bed. The one who dissapeared each day in that closed laboratory, unreachable, and emerged soundless, a walking ghost.

(maybe their love is just that, an experiment, carefully conducted and kept in secret, waiting to be exposed to open air, like a wound, and the air stings but the wound is healing)

He puts his hand on her neck and kisses the corner of her mouth, pulling her to the floor, rattling of papers, hissing of clothes against clothes.

Hawkeye sits over his laps and looks down on him, staring like he was something precious and breakable ( _am I that fragile?_ he asks her, like a glass, and _yes, you are_ , only because I would like to hide you from the world, from all harm, and keep you by my side so nobody could touch you), runs a finger over his chest, watching him wince in pain when she touches around the recent wounds.

"Ishval is where I met you," Roy replies, very serious, more than usual. "Ishval is where I first began to love you. I will never want to lose that name."

It´s Furyls handwriting under her palms, and ink under her fingernails; his hands are full of her hips and his mouth is full of her hair and for a moment fucking is as easy and necessary as breathing, as drawing the next breath, natural, unconciously. This is the you you share with the wild earth, this is you rooting, flourishing.

With one hand hand he reaches for her face, fingers never quite getting where they want to, falling always one step behind. It´s like he remembers how to be alive, how to breath, fight, because he remembers being by her side.

(and it was you, under the enemy skyline, it was you, you, you, and you were there to save me, if only for the way look under the midnight limelights)

"It was a beautiful sky, anyway" he says, kissing her fingertips. "I wouldn´t want to lose it."

She nods, still unconvinced but touched by his words (she still wants to cut the throats of evey Ishvarite and bomb the country, so he would never have to be reminded of it anymore); with the static of the radio off there is soundless intimacy in the tower, the only noise a mixture of heartbeats, moans and folded pages.

 

*

 **  
**

**kaleidoscopes**

*

 

"I once gave you a kaleidoscope. For your birthday. I hoped you would understand what that meant. Because you always understand."

 

*

 **  
**

**pseudothyrum**

*

 

A wall in your heart, a hole in your wall.

Hawkeye is a soldier, after all: she knows how useless a frontal attack would be in this case. She had chosen the back door, harder to find (the hand on the knob, the creaking of old, untouched wood) but less guarded. He wears these masks and one by one they fall; but Hawkeye is no fool, they only fall because Roy lets them. He draws the line on how close she can come, just as she shuts herself from him most of the time, but Roy is water and it pours through the cracks in her wall.

That's the charade, that's the game.

"But we must remember it's only a game," he says, one arm thrown under his head, the other around her waist and her weight making it difficult to breath.

The way his voice turns dark and low and dangerous is a secret, _their_ secret; the way she smiles at his words is also a secret, he never witness that smile outside this room, this world and continent and country of two.

His fingers are like papercuts and she can taste whole volumes of mythology and legends on his skin, she can taste every book he has ever read, the words are in his bloodstream, the dusk smell of paper and dry ink on his hair, the titles filling his eyes. And when she dreams about Roy she always wakes up smelling of rolls of old parchment.

*

Many universes away from them, the lazy afternoon dying as orange light grinds into her room's floor, Hiromu Arakawa takes a pencil and gathers virgin pages of white paper.

It's only fiction, after all. But it's nothing less.

*

(If I am only fiction, he tells Hawkeye, then... does that mean my love for you is not real, either?)  



End file.
